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Alex Spinov
Alex Spinov

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Coolify Has a Free Self-Hosted Platform That Replaces Heroku and Vercel

#coolify #selfhosted #deployment #devops

Heroku killed its free tier. Vercel's limits are tight. Railway is getting expensive. Coolify gives you a self-hosted PaaS on YOUR server — deploy apps, databases, and services with a beautiful UI, all for the cost of a $5/month VPS.

What Coolify Gives You for Free

  • One-click deployments — git push to deploy (like Heroku)
  • Database management — PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis with one click
  • SSL certificates — automatic Let's Encrypt
  • Docker & Docker Compose — deploy any containerized app
  • Multiple servers — manage a fleet from one dashboard
  • Monitoring — CPU, memory, disk, and logs in the UI
  • Backups — automated database backups to S3
  • Team access — invite collaborators with role-based access

Quick Start (5 Minutes) 

# On your VPS (Ubuntu 22.04+)
curl -fsSL https://cdn.coollabs.io/coolify/install.sh | bash
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Open http://your-server-ip:8000 — Coolify is running.

Deploy a Next.js App

  1. Connect your GitHub repo in Coolify dashboard
  2. Select "Next.js" as build pack
  3. Click Deploy
  4. Your app is live with SSL at your-domain.com

That's it. No Dockerfile needed — Coolify detects your framework and configures everything.

Deploy a Database

  1. Click "New Resource" → "Database"
  2. Select PostgreSQL (or MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, MariaDB)
  3. Click Create
  4. Copy the connection string

Backups are configured automatically. Point-in-time recovery included.

Docker Compose Support 

# docker-compose.yml — paste into Coolify
services:
  app:
    build: .
    environment:
      - DATABASE_URL=${DATABASE_URL}
    ports:
      - "3000:3000"

  db:
    image: postgres:16
    volumes:
      - pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data
    environment:
      - POSTGRES_DB=myapp

volumes:
  pgdata:
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Coolify handles SSL, domain routing, and environment variables.

Supported Frameworks (Auto-Detected)

  • Next.js, Nuxt, SvelteKit, Remix, Astro
  • Laravel, Rails, Django, FastAPI
  • Node.js, Python, Go, Rust, PHP
  • Static sites (HTML, Vite, Create React App)
  • Any Docker image or Docker Compose file

One-Click Services

Coolify has a marketplace of 100+ services:

  • Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, ClickHouse
  • Tools: n8n, Plausible, Umami, Ghost, Gitea
  • Storage: MinIO, Directus
  • Monitoring: Grafana, Prometheus, Uptime Kuma

Cost Comparison

Service Coolify (self-hosted) Heroku Vercel Railway
Web app $5/mo VPS $7/mo (Eco) Free (limited) $5+/mo
Database Included $5-50/mo N/A $5+/mo
SSL Free (Let's Encrypt) Included Included Included
Custom domain Free $7/mo plan Free Free
Multiple apps Unlimited Per-dyno pricing Per-project Per-service
Total (5 apps + DB) $5/mo $60+/mo N/A $30+/mo

Who's Using Coolify

  • 30K+ GitHub stars — one of the most popular self-hosted projects
  • Used by indie hackers, startups, and agencies tired of PaaS pricing
  • Active development with weekly releases

The Verdict

Coolify is Heroku for people who own a server. Beautiful UI, one-click deployments, automatic SSL, database management — all self-hosted. If you have a $5 VPS, you have a full PaaS.

Need help building production web scrapers or data pipelines? I build custom solutions. Reach out: spinov001@gmail.com

Check out my awesome-web-scraping collection — 400+ tools for extracting web data.

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